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Pelikan release for end of 2024
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Today I am reviewing the upcoming release of gorgeous delights from Jakub, Jaroslav and the
Pelikan team. You may have seen the
video
already by Ivan - he also does all the photography for the Pelikan site and he
is brilliant at it.
Twister Box
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Twister Box - a new Pelikan design
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This beautiful little creation is a
Pelikan design
and it is really
REALLY clever with a wonderful laugh out loud moment when the
secret is discovered. The team has made it using Mahogany, Walnut and
magnets…
LOTS of magnets and really
REALLY strong ones too. Don’t
put this near your pacemaker! They have made some lovely slipfeathers and an engraved spiral on top to make
it even more pretty. The aim, obviously, is to open the box. Bear in mind that I am really
bad at boxes (I have several sequential discovery boxes sitting in my kitchen
annoying Mrs S because I have failed to find any moves at all). Reading this paragraph there are a whole lot of "really's" in it but this puzzle needs all of them!
I discovered the first step of this puzzle quite quickly which is how I knew
there were magnets. Once this discovery is past you then it’s time to play
with what you have found. You do this by feel and intuition and have to try
and understand why things inside seem to be flipping over and back at times.
The odd thing is it just all feels rather random. You need to keep at it for a
while and all of a sudden there is a change and you’ve opened it. I would
guess that most people will open it mostly by chance and then laugh and then
play with the open box mechanism for a while to understand what you did and
work out a cleaner quicker way to do it. I can now open and re-lock it in a
matter of a minute now that I understand the clever mechanism. I must say that
I have never seen anything like it before.
It took me a whole week to open it and I’ve been playing with it for a few
hours now and it still makes me smile when I look at the mechanism. This is
stunning.
Little Tetra Flop
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Little Tetra Flop by Dr Volker Latussek
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This fabulous new challenge from
Dr Volker Latussek
continues the wonderful Flop series but showing that he can now see the
benefits of the side holes over the loss of purity from an incomplete box.
Pelikan has created this beauty out of Wenge and American Cherry, keeping
the 4x1 piece outside of the box (which is 4x3x2 voxels with a 1½ voxel deep
entry postbox on top).
The first challenge is to work out how to remove the pieces from the box. As
we all know Volker designs both the puzzle and the delivery conformation to
be a challenge and this one really takes it to the max - it took me a good
30 minutes to get all the pieces free. I love this aspect of these puzzles.
Having taken them out, you now have 6 of the usual set of tetrominoes to put
back in using the trademark flop moves.
First thing to do is find the possible assemblies of which there are 14.
Obviously the restricted entry helps limit the numbers and you also need to
decide whether Volker would stoop so low as to use the side hole of the box to
place the last piece. So how should you go about narrowing down the
assemblies? I got slightly lucky and managed it after a few hours of trying
random positions before realising that the most important thing to do was to
leave enough space for the insertion of the pieces that can only be rotated
into the box.
The Aha! moment is wonderful with this puzzle. It’s yet another example of
Volker’s genius mind. It’s not too horrendous and very very clever. Having
solved it, I then had to try and find the delivery assembly all over again.
Brilliant fun!
Centrifuge
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Centifuge by Lucie Pauwels
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This lovely little challenge from
Lucie Pauwels
has been made in a gorgeous red grained Merbau and a very white contrasting Ash.
It consists of a square frame surrounding a 3x3x3 hole to be filled with the
unusually shaped pieces. There are holes in each other the 4 walls of the
frame which need to be filled once the pieces are packed.
I spent a good 15 minutes trying to construct a 3x3x3 cube which could fit
inside before I sheepishly came to the realisation that a) this was
impossible and b) would make the holes in the frame totally superfluous.
Having had my eejit moment I then looked at constructing the shapes that
would fit inside. This is a nice intuitive challenge because the pieces have
½ voxels sliced off in strategic places which really narrows down the
possible arrangements. Obviously it is important that none of the ½ voxels
are visible from above or below or in the holes and this adds to the
challenge.
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Very clever solution
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This is not terribly tough but the sequence is clever and the aha! moment is
very nice. It’s especially good if you don’t waste your time trying to do the
impossible!
Shiba Inu
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Shiba Inu (Limba version)
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Garapa version - deliberately not showed off the shape of the dog
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Here we have a couple of challenges in one from the amazing
Girish Sharma. It’s a 6 piece burr with a single solution (no key piece) and then a 7
piece burr with the addition of the little dog inside the burr. Jakub and team
have created two versions of this one. One made from a gorgeous Garapa and the
other from a beautifully grained Limba. These are sent out as assembly
challenges which will cause you some significant difficulty.
You would think that I, as a self confessed burr lover, would find this easy,
but you’d be completely wrong. I may adore burrs (especially those that are
part of the burr zoo) but I am awful at assembling them from scratch. I’m
more of a puzzler who works to disassemble them and gain a muscle memory to
help with reassembly (or I resort to Burrtools). I have multiple burrsets
and yet still struggle to assemble a standard 6 piece burr - especially if
the level is greater than 1 (hence the key piece comment). I started work on
this one morning and it took me a whole 2 days to find even one assembly of
the 6 piece burr. I was only able to do it because the solution that I found
had a level 1.2 solution (i.e. it had a key piece that didn’t look like a
solid key piece). Yes, I had found the simplest possible assembly of the 6
piece burr. Once I disassembled it and set the pieces out on a table in the
correct orientation, I realised that there was no space inside for the
doggie. There must be at least one more assembly that has a different
interior cavity. It had taken me 2 days just to find one simple one - this
was going to be a puzzle for Burrtools.
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Not quite there!
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Just the 6 piece burr assembled
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Luckily I love making BT files and this was a nice easy one. The fabulous
computer program showed me that there were 14 solutions to the 6 piece burr
and only one of them was able to contain the dog. There was no way I would
find the assembly myself so I used BT to tell me which burr sticks went where
and after a good few hours managed to assemble the complete 7 piece burr.
There is a nice little surprise for you when you do get it together (no
spoiler here though).
Lisa and Lottie
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Lisa and Lottie by Dr Volker Latussek
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Remove the pieces this way
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This incredible piece of puzzle analysis by Dr Latussek is definitely
one for the collection of the hard-core puzzler. It is not for the
faint-hearted - it is difficult…really
REALLY difficult! The Pelikan
team have made this exquisite puzzle from Bubinga with an Elm box.
Unusually for one of Volker’s creations it is sent out completely assembled
in the box. The entry hole seems much much larger than the usual we have
seen for the Flop series which gave me hope…until I tried to take them out
of the box. I managed to take 4 of them out and then got stuck - are there
rotations? No matter what I tried, I could not rotate any of the remaining
pieces at all. This was very odd. Jakub never makes mistakes like this so I
had a closer look and I then noticed that one of the sides of the boxes was
removable. Once I had actually seen all the pieces, I had a bit of a panic!
There were a lot of pieces and they were quite complex.
Volker said this about the puzzle:
“_Some of my puzzles start with a complete set of pieces, for each of
which I have looked for a matching box to formulate a packing problem.
Published examples of this are YIN YANG (6), TETRA-FLOP (8) and today
LISA AND LOTTIE (10).
For LISA AND LOTTIE, Toshiaki Betsumiya had already proposed a complete
set of ten pieces with GEMINI in 1987, each consisting of two half cubes
(0.5x1x1) with a common contact area of at least one quarter (0.5x0.5).
A few years ago, I initially asked myself which eight pieces could be
packed into the cube-shaped box (2x2x2) of CASINO. At that time, I had
to find the answer with the help of a self-written Fortran program in
order to be able to present the BOX (2.5x2x2) for the ten pieces
today.
There are 25 ways to build a corresponding cuboid (2.5x2x2), but only
one way to put the pieces through the opening - which is the reason why
I asked Pelikan to make a small batch of LISA AND LOTTIE. The uniqueness
of the solution is very surprising to me, as I assumed there was no
solution, even though the opening (1.5x2) is impressively large.
If you are willing to look at the ten pieces and how they interact, you
will find the solution. Along the way, you can store the ten pieces in
the box. _”
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All ways to join 2 1x2x2 tetrominoes
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This meant that if I could find one of the 25 possible cuboid assemblies then
at least I could get it back inside. Off I went on my search. So far I have
been totally unable to assemble even a cuboid to put back through side of the
box, let alone find a way to put them all in through the hole in the top. I
made a BT file for this one and found that the assembly in the box is not
possible without some rotations so even if you do cheat a little bit then
there is still going to be a huge challenge for you - there are 25 assemblies
and 4 possible orientations of each to try. 100 possibilities even with the
actual assembly shown is definitely a massive task. I am saving this for when
I have a
LOT of time on my hands. This is an incredible piece of puzzle
analysis and something for the true puzzler.
Open Frame
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Open Frame by Lucie Pauwels
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This is a second of these amazing challenges by Lucie Pauwels to match the
Minimal Frame from the
last release. Like its' predecessor, it is a very colourful 2D packing puzzle with
multiple different woods combined with an anti-slide puzzle using a very
minimal frame but this time the edges of the frame are formed by single voxel
pieces in the centre of each side (unlike the last one which had only 2 corner
pieces). There are 9 pieces to be fit inside the 7x7 square. There is an
overlap between the two puzzles with some shared pieces but the very simple
ones are different.
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Close but not there
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I went to work and yet again, realised that tray packing puzzles are
very difficult for me. I did manage after an hour or so to find a single
assembly. It is oddly difficult to place these pieces into such an open tray. Like the Minimal frame, I was able to get many not quite there solutions but
actually making the complete square shape proved very tough. The solution I
found was satisfying but it did not fulfil the anti slide requirement. There
are 2 pieces in the puzzle which must be oriented in a certain way to prevent
them slipping out an edge or you must find a way to confine them to the
interior of the assembly shape.
A quick resort to Burrtools showed me that there are 15 possible assemblies
of the square but only one of them is also anti-slide. I won’t show the
final solution but once you look at it, it is a marvellous thing to behold!
This is a huge challenge and very attractive! If you have the Minimal Frame
then you owe it to yourself to get this one to go with it.
X-Ray
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X-Ray byBenjamin Heidt
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This beautiful creation made from Wenge, Purpleheart and Maple is the sixth of
the puzzles from Jakub designed by
Benjamin Heidt. Like most of his designs there is always something different and
clever about them and this is no exception. It looks like a standard 6 piece
burr made with tubular burr sticks, except there are 10 sticks in total, with 4 of them
split into 2 halves. It is designed so that you can see right through it to
work out what is going on inside, hence the name. Being based on a 12x12x12
grid it might give you an idea that there could be some rather involved
movements and you wouldn't be wrong. My initial exploration managed to move
the pieces a long way apart whilst still interlocked and nowhere to go.
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Almost there? Not a chance!
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Interestingly, there are very few blind ends in dismantling this one and those
that there are, are relatively short. The challenge here is to find the
pathway. The hollow nature of the sticks means that you can see almost
everything but despite this I got blocked on numerous occasions. Part of the
reason for this is the rather sharp internal edges which need very precise
alignment but once you think that you can see a move, stick with it, make sure
it's all aligned correctly and it goes very smoothly. Whilst the level is a
pleasant 14.2.3.2.1.1.1.2, it is a really good challenge to effectively
work your way through the maze. I find that for complex burrs the teens and
twenties is just about right for an enjoyable experience.
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Brilliant clever design
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These wonderful puzzles should go on sale at
Pelikan's website on Wednesday, 13th November at 10am CET (9am GMT, 4am EST & 1am PST). Whilst you are there, there are still a few copies of the wonderful
Sukiyaki which I reviewed
here and Benjamin's incredible
Steam Boat which I reviewed
here.
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